


My Rival

by Dewdropzz



Series: In Honour of a Good Man [9]
Category: Professor Layton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-28 15:27:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11420850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dewdropzz/pseuds/Dewdropzz
Summary: Once I fell in love with the girl of my dreams. "The girl of my dreams." Ha. Sounds like some fool-headed youth's lovesick fantasy. I almost wish that was all it was. With Claire it was an obsession, a long-living infatuation. From the moment I met the spirited, intelligent red-head I knew I wanted to marry her.





	My Rival

Have you ever wanted something so badly that it kept you awake at night? Something that, when it came into your life, you knew you would never be content without it? A desire that governed your thought life; the one thought that all your thoughts seemed to return to? The one dream that all your other dreams revolved around? Something you were willing to do whatever it took to attain, because you knew when you did your entire universe would be complete. That thing that you wanted, did you have it stolen from you? Did you achieve it in the end, or did something, or someone rip it out of your reach, and prevent it from ever being yours?

Once I fell in love with the girl of my dreams. "The girl of my dreams." Ha. Sounds like some fool-headed youth's lovesick fantasy. I almost wish that was all it was. With Claire it was an obsession, a long-living infatuation. From the moment I met the spirited, intelligent red-head I knew I wanted to marry her. Does that sound a bit lecherous? Maybe it was. But that's how I felt about her. When Hershel Layton came into the picture... Not that he was ever not in the picture. He was just another male friend of Claire's — I honestly thought I had more to fear with that older physicist she worked with, Daren or Dimitri or whatever that guy's name was... Well, when Hershel Layton pushed his way in and swept Claire off her feet, that's when my whole world was suddenly forced to change. I could no longer daydream about the day she said yes. I had no right to think about the future we had together. There was no point in even imagining our first date anymore, or going through the words I would say when I finally got up the nerve to ask her! I tell ya, when he came along and made Claire fall in love with him, I just about jumped in the river and drown myself! Fortunately there were enough people around to witness my, uh, accident so I didn't actually drown.

I was a changed man after that; never the same again. I felt different. When I looked in the mirror I swear I even looked different! I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was, but I do know that after that fateful day, I took on a completely different view of the world. I couldn't wrap my brain around how grossly unfair life could be! I mean, I dedicated practically all my time just to thinking about Claire! Did Hershel Layton do that? I put in for a transfer to the Institute of Polydimensional Physics just so I could work in the same building as her! Did Hershel Layton do that? On my days off I used to get up early to be at the coffee shop by six a.m., just because I knew she always stopped there before work and I could see her there! Hershel Layton definitely didn't do that! I never saw him in there once before noon. Especially not in the winter when it was cold and dark, and there wasn't a further desire from your heart than to get out of bed and go get a beverage you didn't even enjoy.

I really thought I had a chance with her. I thought... I thought she liked me. She enjoyed talking to me, about life, about work, about my projects. I would show her my inventions, and she would smile that rosy smile and say "Paul, you're brilliant!" when other people would say "Paul... Haha... You're crazy."  
She was unlike anyone I'd ever met, woman or otherwise. I really thought we were made for each other. I tried so hard to get her to love me, but in the end it was Layton she fell for. I swore I would one day get revenge on him for taking her away from me. But... they seemed so happy together. I said if he ever made Claire cry, I would go after him. But he never made her cry. I'd see them out walking... holding hands... laughing. She'd tell me how good to her he was, and she gave him all the love she had to offer. And I thought that if Claire was happy, maybe I should have been as well. She had what she wanted — If I really loved her I should have been glad for the happiness she found. I didn't think I could ever move on, but as long as Layton took care of her...

Have you ever loved something so deeply, so powerfully and passionately and truly that you were willing to let it go, only to have it viciously torn from your life, and your heart along with it? Claire never should have got involved with that cursed time travel project. I told her I had a bad feeling about it the first time she spoke about her new job. The time machine was nowhere near ready, and the next thing I knew they were testing it. To think those monsters who had the audacity to call themselves good men of science were willing to use that angel as a lab rat! They put her in the machine and tried to make her travel through time, long before it was ready for a human test subject! And Hershel Layton... he let her do it. He let her go. If I was the lucky man to be with her, I would have never allowed it to happen. Layton let them take her. He let her die.

How could I have let it happen? I hated myself, and I hated that fiend Layton for not protecting her. I had left my friend in his hands, thinking that he would take care of her. And now she was gone, lost to a fatal explosion. Well, he was going to pay for his heedless mistake, with his life. I was going to make sure of that. An eye for an eye. Layton killed Claire, or so it seemed to me, and I was not going to turn the other cheek. The fool was becoming famous for his "monumental archaeological discoveries". He even saved the world once from some ancient power from a lost civilization, however that works. And I thought, how could he save the world and not Claire? How could he have prevented the entire planet from meeting their demise, and he couldn't save the one person who should have mattered most? Everyone was praising him as a hero; my hatred for Layton only grew. I hated the way they said there was no puzzle he couldn't solve. I hated the little boy who followed him around and idolized him. I hated that foppish hat Claire had given him as a gift. Do you know she gave it to him on the morning before she died? She bought it in celebration of him becoming a professor, and he wore it all the time as if it had simply always been there; as if he was born with it on his head; as if nothing had ever happened. It didn't even upset him to wear it...

A few weeks after the Azran incident, I began to device schemes to make Layton pay for his crimes. Using my own grey matter and the very machines Claire had once called "brilliant", I set out to A) kill him, or B) injure him critically. I would have preferred Plan A, though I supposed Claire had been injured critically before she died, not that I wanted to think about that... I followed Layton everywhere he went: to an artificial town inhabited by robots, to another one inhabited by illusions. You'd be surprised how many artificial towns there are in Britain! They're actually great for carrying out evil plots, as none of the residents suspect anything. Naturally I still had to change my name, and go under a false identity. I didn't want my friends or family to find out what I was doing. What would my mother say if she found out? What would my old professors say? Don Paolo was the alias I ended up deciding on. It sounded Italian, which I was not, so it didn't give anything away, but it was still similar enough to my own name that it suited me, and I liked it. I got myself a snazzy purple coat with a collar that was sure to strike fear into the eyes of anyone I met. With my new name and look, nobody would recognize me as I disguised myself to emulate various people in an effort to hoodwink, swindle and otherwise deceive Layton, all for the good of the mission. What was the point of disguising myself before I disguised myself? There was certainly a point! I mean, I wasn't always in costume. I wasn't when I hijacked that Ferris wheel, I don't think... Or when I knocked down that beautiful, eccentric looking tower in St. Mystere... It was kind of a shame to have to demolish that one.

I did plenty of fun and exciting things on my quest to destroy Layton. Unfortunately, revenge did have a price — A high monetary price. Putting together all those costumes, constructing my ingenious contraptions... It left my pockets more than a little empty feeling, and most of the time I had enough for food and little else. Sometimes I had to resort to desperate measures in order to fund my work. One time I stole a relic of great archaeological value from one of my old professors. Ironically enough, it turned out to be the main attraction of some spellbinding mystery Hershel Layton chose to stick his nose into. Imagine my delight, stealing an item that could make me rich as well as ticking off that ingrate goody-goody! When I wasn't trying to kill Layton, I was usually making his life miserable in any way I could. I overheard him saying to his little flunky one day that nothing was as pleasing as hearing the chimes of Big Ben at the turn of every hour. I broke my back trying to find a way to silence that bell! Of course he foiled me in the end. Not only did he find out how I'd done it, and how to restore the stupid thing to its former cacophonous glory, he even found out that a Mr. Don Paolo was the mastermind behind the vandalism, even though I had been under the disguise of an old lady the entire time! Grr! It had been one of my better disguises too... I had the voice down pat.

This was the way of it for me; this was the norm. I'd chase Professor Layton around as if I were his shadow, traveling with him as if he had arranged for me to accompany him, as if I were his friend. I tried to sabotage him, but it never worked. I was unsuccessful at all my attempts at Plan A, and even Plan B. You'd think I would have considered myself a failure by this point. I had failed to win Claire's affection, failed to save her from her grim fate, and now I had failed multiple times to exact revenge on the man who condemned her. It was strange, though; when I thought about it, my unsuccessful attempts to defeat him did not seem like failures to me. I spent a lot of time with the bloke, you know. Practically all my time, in fact, was devoted to tormenting him. You could say he gave me a purpose, in a manner of speaking, now that I was not spending my days and nights planning my future with Claire. If I was not chasing him, what else would I have been doing? He wasn't a bad guy to be around, anyway. He once adopted a young girl, probably around fourteen at the time. Her parents had both died, and she had been left all alone in one of those artificial towns. Layton took her in and treated her like his own daughter. I disguised as her once and traveled for a time with he and Luke to the phantom town of Folsense. I don't think I admit it to myself at the time, but it wasn't absolutely horrible solving puzzles with them around town — Quite the opposite, if I'm being truly honest. It was kind of exciting to be there to witness first hand the events that were continuously landing the infamous name of Professor Layton in the papers. It appeared frequently in the London Times, and occasionally the criminal mastermind of Don Paolo would receive honourable mention. It wasn't unusual for Layton and his spectacle of a hat to appear gracing the front page, however, one day when I opened up the morning paper to see if our latest adventure had made the news, another man had stolen our spotlight: a man with a name I didn't recognize, but an appearance I surely did.

It had been ten years since Claire's fatal accident, and I hadn't seen either of her scum employers since. I knew one had gone into politics — Typical. And now it seemed the other, the one who had had a crush on her, was continuing his research into the taboo science of time travel. The name the paper called him was not the one I remembered him to go by, but the character was, unquestionably, him. How many physicists could there be in London with the same unusual hairstyle? As soon as I read the headline I was enraged. How could he have still been perusing the puerile fantasy that had cost his assistant her life? Apparently he'd hosted some fancy gala in the park, and invited some of London's most influential citizens to watch the grand unveiling of his machine. The story wasn't on the front page for the demonstration's roaring success, however. The time machine had exploded, just as it had ten years before, and what made this shocking occurrence even more newsworthy was the mysterious disappearance of the machine's creator, along with the prime minister of England. Oh geez, where had I seen that face before? That paper was the bringer of two important realizations for me: one that Claire's scum employer number one had covertly risen through the ranks to become the prime minister without me knowing, and two that both of her employers had suddenly gone missing in an accident sickeningly similar to her fatal one. It was too suspicious for me to not get involved. I had no choice but to investigate.

Why, oh why, did I have to stick my noes in where it didn't belong? What was I, Layton? I didn't need to know the time machine had actually worked all those years ago! I didn't need to know, I didn't need to know, I didn't need to know Claire was still alive, but not for long, and it was ultimately up to us to save her. Not up to me exactly, but to Dimitri — Yes, that was his real name — to build another time machine. When I discovered the supposedly vanished Dr. Stahngun sneaking away from the flat of one Dimitri Allen, I confronted him, and for better or worse he remembered me as a friend of Claire's, and confided in me his plans in the hopes that I could help him. He confessed that the whole time machine demonstration had been a front to kidnap Bill Hawks, whom Dimitri explained was the real culprit responsible for Claire's dea-, er, disembodiment. Cor, I wish I had known that ten years ago... The old geezer would have been much easier to bump off than Layton, that's for sure... Hawks had been taken underground to yet another one of those artificial towns. But this one was different. This was an exact recreation of London, masterfully erected to resemble the artist's vision of our fair city ten years in the future. The city was to deceive the numerous scientists Dimitri had kidnapped into thinking they had been taken to the future. The scientists had been abducted for their services in building a time machine, and they worked tirelessly to build it, day and night, solely because Dimitri told them it was the only way they could get back to their own time. And it was all for, what?

In reality the time machine was to save Claire, who needed it to stabilize her being in the "future." When Dimitri told me she was alive, the first thing I imagined was that she would be in a coma, or some kind of hypersleep; still breathing, cells functioning, heart beating, but not alive so that she could speak to us, or know that we were there. When I first saw her in the underground town called Future London, she walked up to me, and hugged me. She smiled that rosy smile and said "Paul, it's so good to see you." She remembered me, in fact she said to her it felt like no time had even passed. She had gone to sleep one moment, and the next thing she knew she was waking up in Dimitri's lab as if she had blacked out for only a second. It was hard for her to comprehend that she had died and come back. It was wonderful to see her again. Absolutely wonderful. But I wish I didn't have to see her. It was too strange seeing her alive after all this time, I didn't even know how to react. It was so surreal, it was like a dream; a beautiful, strange dream that I knew wouldn't end happily. It was only a matter of time. It was like we were prolonging the inevitable; dragging out our torture. Nevertheless we all continued working on the time machine; Dimitri and I, the shanghaied scientists, some rich kid who hated Hawks' guts and of course Claire. Sweet Claire did whatever she could to assist us in any way possible. She fought bravely for her own life, not only for the sake of living, but for living with us — And Hershel, she said. She said she would never have wanted to stay so badly if we hadn't been working so hard to keep her here. She wanted to stay with us.

When the time machine wasn't working no matter what we tried, we reasoned it was because there was something terribly important missing. The machine was being built specifically for Claire, and so it needed to constitute some personal components that made it her own. In order to allow her to stay in the present, the machine needed to know her past. Claire had provided everything she could, and now it seemed the memories of the person closest to her, the one she spent the most time with in the weeks and months before she died, were required. The only way we could save her now was to bring Layton into the picture. I resented having to spoil my perfect, bittersweet, final moments with Claire, but maybe if his memories were really the last piece of the puzzle we needed... maybe they wouldn't have to be final moments. And, as much as I hated to admit it, it was Layton's right. He was, after all, the one she loved, and he was a genius. If he could save her from going back to her own time, I would be forever in his debt.

Dimitri didn't think sending him a friendly invitation was a good idea. The professor was a do-gooder, and we had no reason to believe he would not turn us into the authorities if we were explicit in telling him our plans. Also Claire, the little angel she was, didn't want him to know she was alive until she knew she was going to stay that way, in order to avoid causing him more pain. Because heaven forbid dearest Hershel should experience the pain Dimitri and I went through. Uggh... We needed to lure him in some other way. The rich kid generously took matters into his own hands. He rigged a disguise for himself with skill that could rival my own, and concocted a hilarious ploy involving an evil Layton from ten years in the future. Layton fell for all our tricks, just as we had hoped, and with his lackey and his cute little adoptive daughter by his side, he traipsed all over Future London and sooner than later debunked its secrets, with a little help — No, make that a lot of help from yours truly. Eh, the rich kid got him here, and Dimitri took on the role of "future Layton". The least I could do was turn myself into an exact copy of the professor and allow Dimitri to lock me up while he went free. I had been waiting for a chance to use that costume anyway.

As it turned out, we were glad we got Layton involved. As intelligent as I was, not even I had realized that the rich kid had criminal intentions...that could barely be justified. He wanted revenge on people who had never wronged him, and by people I mean all of London. Who could have known he had been building a Mobile Fortress to level the city all along? Layton figured it out and enlightened us all, but this time the professor didn't save the day by himself. This time I was a help, and not a hindrance, by using my "brilliant" inventing skills to transform that ridiculous automobile of his into a plane. ...It would make more sense if you had been there, trust me. Ultimately Claire was the hero of this story, however. With her incredible mind and the will of her heart, she dismantled the Mobile Fortress, and saved all of London. She even rescued that little brat from his well-deserved fate!

...So why couldn't we save her? Why was there nothing anyone could do? We were all willing to do whatever it took, because if it had worked our entire universe would have been complete...

I always hated Hershel Layton. Or at least I told myself I did, because I loved Claire. I loved her, I thought, more than anyone else in the world did, and I used my hatred of Layton as a sort of payback on he and life for being so cruel and unfair. On that November night when Layton recognized his lost love; when Claire had to go back to her own time, and Layton plead with her to stay even though he knew it was impossible, I learned just how cruel and unfair the world really was. Fate was wretched to Claire, as well as to her lover who took off his hat and cried in the falling snow. I knew now that he did love her. He loved her with no boundaries; more than his reputation, his pride. He loved her enough to lose it all in the end, after keeping his composure through some of the toughest trials the human mind could fathom. He loved her enough that he would never be content without her, and would be kept awake every night, probably for the rest of his life. And I could see that my suffering through the years could not compare to his suffering now, and I regretted the day I ever cursed that beloved hat of his.

I reached out to him at that time. It was the start of a new friendship for us, or perhaps the next chapter of a friendship that had already begun during the time I spent harassing him. We ended up having a lot in common, he and I. We had lived through many of the same experiences. And we both had the same excellent taste in women. I went to see him just the other day, in fact, and he tells me he's approaching what will surely be the best time of his life. I couldn't be any happier for my friend. Soon he and Claire will be reunited, and they can begin their eternity together... When I die though, you'd better believe I'll be right in there with them — Not between them, of course. Never between them. But together with them, and we'll share that promised perfect friendship and love they speak of. And none of us will ever want again.


End file.
